Longtime San Franciscan Marilyn Blaisdell talks about her private historic photo collection of Sutro Baths at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, October 27, 2011.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Longtime San Franciscan Marilyn Blaisdell talks about her private...

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This is the final look for the Sutro Baths facade -- the entrance was remodeled several times. This photo was taken in the 1950s or early 1960s. The structure burned to the ground in 1966.

Photo: Courtesy Marilyn Blaisdell

This is the final look for the Sutro Baths facade -- the entrance...

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The largest of the Sutro Baths pools can be seen here, in a photo from the 1950s or early 1960s. The structure burned to the ground in 1966. The baths held up to 2 million gallons of ocean water, and were separated and heated to different temperatures.

Photo: Courtesy Marilyn Blaisdell

The largest of the Sutro Baths pools can be seen here, in a photo...

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Longtime San Franciscan Marilyn Blaisdell talks about her private historic photo collection of Sutro Baths, where her collection is featured in a documentary, "Sutro", in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, October 27, 2011.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Longtime San Franciscan Marilyn Blaisdell talks about her private...

Image 5 of 5

Marilyn Blaisdell stands in front of the Cliff House in the 1960s. She would later run a store called San Francisciana that sold postcards, banners and other memorabilia related to Cliff House, Sutro Baths and Playland-At-The-Beach.

The Sutro Baths had already burned to the ground when Marilyn Blaisdell began her unrivaled photo collection of the sprawling swimming, ice skating and museum complex.

The mother of six, who raised her children a few blocks from the baths at Lands End in San Francisco, was asked in 1972 by former Cliff House owner George Whitney Jr. to spend a few weeks at a souvenir stand selling off the remnants of his father and uncle's Sutro, Playland-at-the-Beach and Cliff House collections.

"Instead of staying on for two months, I stayed for 12 years," Blaisdell says. "I just loved it. I loved meeting the people, and then I started to create my own products."

Over the past five decades, often one piece at a time, Blaisdell has compiled one of the greatest private collections of historical San Francisco photographs - including an unrivaled cache documenting the city's seaside entertainment past in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Residents will get a rare peek into her sterling Sutro images in the new movie "Sutro's: The Palace at Lands End," which begins its run at the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco on Friday.

It's a follow-up to local filmmaker Tom Wyrsch's popular "Remembering Playland-at-the-Beach" documentary, a 2010 film that was booked as a one-night showing at the Balboa and ended up in the theater for nearly six months.

Wyrsch had never met Blaisdell when she showed up on the opening night of "Playland."

"She said, 'I have a collection that you might be interested in,' " Wyrsch says. "I had no idea how big it would be."

35,000 photos

Blaisdell, now 83, sold many of her glass negatives to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. But she still has more than 35,000 photos, plus postcards, tickets and other memorabilia of San Francisco history. Writing under the banner of San Francisciana - also the name of her former Cliff House store - Blaisdell has published four books of historical San Francisco images (and one of orange crate labels) and is working on another about Woodward's Gardens, an all-but-forgotten amusement park that operated in the Mission District in the 1800s.

Sutro Baths, opened in 1896, was a wonder of engineering and architecture - entertaining the masses with enormous pools, concerts and an eclectic museum, before a suspicious fire razed the structure in 1966. Blaisdell first attended in the 1950s, when the destination was long past its prime.

Blaisdell specializes in photos of Sutro Baths, Playland, the Cliff House and Golden Gate Park, all favorite destinations when she was raising her children from the 1950s to 1970s.

"I didn't care that much about cable cars and street cars and hotels and restaurants," Blaisdell says of her collection. "I was passionate about the areas that our family could go, and have a good time, without costing money."

Blaisdell, an Oregon native, discovered San Francisco at age 10, when her parents drove down for the 1939 World's Fair.

"I just loved this crazy town that had these little tiny postage-stamp yards," she remembers. "I had never seen anyplace where the houses were crammed close together. I fell in love with San Francisco."

She went to Stanford, met her husband, Bill, and lived near Sutro while he worked as a surgeon at Fort Miley Veteran's Hospital in San Francisco. Four of her children visited Sutro before the structure burned.

San Francisciana

After her children were in school, Blaisdell started San Francisciana, creating her own postcards, banners and other memorabilia. Meanwhile, she scoured antiques shows and book fairs, collecting rare photos, while selling the non-San Francisco images to fund more purchases.

Blaisdell hit the mother lode when she found a Cliff House storage room containing an all-but-forgotten collection of glass negatives that she eventually bought from Whitney for $17,500.

"They were thrown everywhere. It looked like garbage," Blaisdell says. "There was broken glass, wooden boxes, newspapers, but this remarkable collection of negatives."

Decades later, she still enjoys the thrill of new finds. The Blaisdells live in two units of the condominium that was built on the Playland footprint - she can see the Dutch Windmill and Golden Gate Park from her kitchen and all the Cliff House from the balcony. Banners, photos and paintings of Sutro Baths and Woodward's Gardens share space with family photos. Blaisdell has 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. One of her prized possessions is a photo of several grandchildren wearing original Sutro Baths swimsuits.

Another unit in the complex is an archive, lined wall to wall with bookcases filled with photos and other history. A framed portrait of Sutro Baths founder (and former San Francisco mayor) Adolph Sutro has a place of honor.

Blaisdell hit it off with Wyrsch, whose ambitions are uniquely regional. He got his start making films about local "Creature Features" stars Bob Wilkins and John Stanley.

'Positive people'

"We have similar interests. And we're both very positive people," says Blaisdell, who contributed more than half of the photos that appear in the documentary. "We discovered early on that neither one of us cared much for the negativism and the cynicism that we see and here today. We're able to tackle something on a positive level. ... For Tom, I would do anything in the world."

Wyrsch feels the same way. He rushed the first copy of "Sutro's" down to her from his Garfield Lane Productions studios in Petaluma. Blaisdell, who is interviewed in the documentary, describes watching the film as "one of the greatest moments of my life." She plans to attend the first matinee on Friday and is taking her husband to the night screening.

From the look on her face, she couldn't be any more excited if she were going to the Oscars.

"When I love something, I just glow with interest," Blaisdell says. "And you never stop looking. You never stop searching if you're a real collector."